Heather Fikel

STUDY ON WHITE PEOPLE The Reminiscences of Heather Fikel

INCITE Columbia University 2018

PREFACE

The following oral history is the result of a recorded interview with Heather Fikel conducted by Whitney Dow on December 17, 2017. This interview is part of the Study on White People.

The reader is asked to bear in mind that they are reading a verbatim transcript of the spoken word, rather than written prose.

ATC

Session #1 (video)

Interviewee: Heather Fikel

Location: Richmond, VA

Interviewer: Whitney Dow

Date: December 17, 2017

Fikel: [11:29:44:04] —parents have one of those cars where when they get close enough, it turns itself on and everything.

Q1: Oh nice. Yes, I don’t know if I want that.

Fikel: [11:29:51:00] I’m not that high-tech yet.

Q1: I’m not sure I want that. I want to, you know.

Q2: How about if the seat heater turned itself on, five minutes before you—

Q1: I like that.

Fikel: [laughs]

Q2: That would work.

Q1: I would like my car to have a seat that wasn’t like bolted in with like an old washer. [laughter] And didn’t have a huge rip across it with like foam sticking out of it.

Fikel – 1 – 4

Q2: Very New York, that’s appropriate.

Fikel: [11:30:13:00] My brother had the Flintstone car where, you know, the salt had rusted out the bottom, and he could see the road as he drove.

Q2: Oh yes.

Q1: I used to have that.

Q2: Yes, I had that too, yes, two of those.

Q1: I remember my wife, I had, when we had a scout, and she brought—she’s like, I got this great car. And she like brought it back, I got it for like four hundred dollars. And I’m like, yes, because you can see the road. [laughter] I’m afraid to get in the front seat, you know?

Q2: [laughs] You’ll never get a littering ticket, because they can’t see you dropping the stuff out.

Q1: Exactly. So, we’ll get started now, how’s—the audio’s good? All right, we’re going to—first of all, tell me your name, your age, where you’re from, and just a little about yourself.

Fikel – 1 – 5 Fikel: [11:30:52:00] My name’s Heather Fikel. I am forty. And I currently live in Blackstone, Virginia, about an hour and a half outside of Richmond. I moved here approximately five years ago from California, but I’ve lived all across the country at various points in my life.

Q1: And tell me a little bit about your life, what you do, what your day is like, what your family is like, the community you live in.

Fikel: [11:31:22:00] We are farmers. Currently, we live on a 113-acre farm. We raise sheep and goats and chickens and pigs and things like that. We have two kids, a seventeen-year-old and a fifteen-year-old. My husband does farm work, pretty much whatever needs to be done, he’s the one that does it. I take care of the animals; that’s kind of my side of it. And other than that, I take care of the kids. We homeschool. We’ve done that for over a decade now. And so our life pretty much revolves around taking care of farm animals and driving kids to various classes in various places, none of which are near where we live, so we usually drive about an hour, hour-and-a-half into town every day for various classes and things like that, because nothing we do is where we actually live. [laughs]

Q1: Now do you come from a farming tradition? Are you, like, a generation of farmers, or are you like a newly-minted farmer couple? Like, what’s the backstory?

Fikel: [11:32:30:00] Neither my husband nor I were farmers to begin with. My husband was a firefighter/paramedic. He was also in the military, and he was injured and is on disability. And while he can do farm work, he’s able to do that at his own pace, so that’s how he’s able to do

Fikel – 1 – 6 that. He does not have—he is not able to be a firefighter/paramedic anymore, but he would love to if he could.

I came from a background where my dad was in credit unions, and every single one of my family members has worked in credit unions at some point, including my mom and myself. So, farming kind of came into it because when I was growing up, I used to read stories by James Herriot, who was a Yorkshire vet, and I kind of fell in love with the whole idea of farming from reading those stories as a kid. I did a lot of reading because I grew up in Alaska for the main part, and there’s not much to do in the winter besides read. [laughs] So, that’s how we fell into farming.

Q1: All creatures great and small.

Fikel: [11:33:38:00] Yes. [laughs] The whole song.

Q1: And where did you grow up in Alaska? Sort of your formative years, where you grew up, what the community was like, why you were in Alaska, where in Alaska?

Fikel: [11:33:50:00] I was actually born in Falls Church, Virginia, but when I was less than a year old, my family moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where my dad worked for a credit union, and then the credit union league there at Anchorage. And we lived there until I was going into middle school, and we moved back to Arlington, Virginia, spent a year and a half there, then moved to outside of Madison, Wisconsin to Middleton and lived there for a year and a half. And then moved to southern California, to Upland, where I went to high school and then went to some

Fikel – 1 – 7 college in Northern Arizona, in Flagstaff, before moving back to California where I met my husband. And we had our kids, and then moved here, five years ago, to Richmond.

Q1: Wow, that’s a—

Fikel: It’s a lot of moving around.

Q1: —a lot of moving around. What compels you to come get involved in this project, come talk to us, that—drive an hour and a half on a Sunday morning to sit in a cold storefront and talk to us about race?

Fikel: [11:34:57:00] [laughs] I believe I heard about this project through Liberal Women of Chesterfield County. Although I don’t live in Chesterfield County, this is a group of women who got together to one of the local politicians who’s in Congress, Dave Bratt. He at one point said something about women being up in his grill. And it became kind of a driving force, you know, the Liberal Women of Chesterfield County then wanted to be up in his grill. And so they created an online community, and worked very, very hard in this last election. The group has actually been mentioned on CNN [Cable News Network] and in the Washington Post because they did some really fantastic work getting the community out and voting in this last election cycle. So this is where I heard about the project. Someone posted a link to it in that group.

I became interested in social justice issues when I was in high school. I had two history teachers who were very influential. One was my teacher my freshman year and my senior year for world

Fikel – 1 – 8 history and American history, and I also did mock trial and debate, and she ran those things. And then the other teacher, I took US History, and he was a member of the Cahuilla tribe in California, Arizona area, and really brought forth a lot more issues that faced native people than I had thought about previous to that. So those two teachers really did influence me a lot with social justice. My parents are also very, and have always been, outspoken about their views and interested in social justice issues. And they continue to do that here in the Richmond area with their church group and in Blackstone where we live, they’re part of a group called “Huddle” where they also talk about social issues and how they can influence politics and things like that in our very conservative area where race is still a big issue.

Q1: And how is it a big issue in your area?

Fikel: [11:37:19:00] Where I live in Blackstone, it is definitely the kind of town where it feels like it’s separated between the white part of town and the black part of town. It was really kind of a shock when we first moved there, because although we knew it was going to different than living in the very diverse part of southern California that we came from, it was still a big change.

The first day that we moved into our house, our neighbor from across the street came over and was talking to us, and he was telling us something; how he felt about the N-word in the White House. And I had never—that was only the second time in my life that someone had used that word in my presence, and just for it to be thrown out so casually was just like, oh my gosh, where did I move? [laughs] So it’s not something that we were used to, and seeing that sort of attitude and knowing that there’s been [Ku Klux] Klan activity not too far from where we live, and us being At, you know, it’s been an interesting look into how the culture is different in

Fikel – 1 – 9 different parts of the country. And also how I feel like a lot of the white community where I live thinks that just because, you know, black people can vote, and because schools were integrated, sometimes not until the 1980s not too far from us, they think that everything’s fine now that everyone has equal opportunity. And I definitely don’t see it that way.

Q1: And so how do you think you and your family is viewed in your community?

Fikel: [11:39:08:00] Our family is—we don’t have a lot to do in the community that’s closest to us in Blackstone. We don’t know a whole lot of people there. The people who do know us, I’m sure, just see us as just another white family, and so I don’t feel like we’re treated very differently where we live. I have had a few people who know that we’re Jewish say, “Oh wow, I’ve never met someone who’s Jewish before.” [laughs] So that’s been interesting. But as far as race, I don’t feel like we are treated anything differently than anyone else in the community.

Q1: Can you talk to me about when you first, in your life, became aware of your own race?

Fikel: [11:39:59:00] I probably became aware of race not—it’s not probably something I ever thought about until I was in high school, where I grew up as a child in Anchorage, Alaska; it’s primarily white, the community that I was in, the schools that I went to. I can think of one African American family that was in our community whose daughter I was friends with and used to go over to her house, and I’m still friends with her on Facebook. But other than that, I don’t think that I had any friends who weren’t white growing up. I can’t remember any other families, so I don’t think that I ever thought about it. I know that it’s something that my parents talked

Fikel – 1 – 10 about as far as equal-opportunity things, but I don’t know that I ever really personally thought about it until later.

Q1: How often do you think about your race now?

Fikel: [11:41:08:00] I think now, I think about my own race more in terms of how can I— [pause]—I’m not sure how to put it. I don’t know that I think specifically about, oh, I’m white, and you know, what should I be doing, and how can I do things, as much as I think about, you know, race in general. And that is something that I think about pretty regularly, as far as what can I do to really try to make things equal? How can I use my whiteness as a way to help educate other white people, especially maybe in the area where I live, about the fact that, although, yes, the Civil Rights Movement happened, it doesn’t mean that everyone is treated equally now?

I did work for two years in a restaurant in South Hill, where there was a mixture of people who worked there, white and non-white. But I absolutely saw different attitudes in customers from time to time, as far as how people were treated based on race. I specifically remember one couple who was from Henderson, North Carolina, because the restaurant was close to the North Carolina border. And they came in and it happened to be that all the servers that were working there that night were white. And the vast majority of the customers who go there are white, because that’s most of the community, and there didn’t happen to be anyone who wasn’t white in the restaurant that night. And when they came in, they had a nice meal, they were perfectly nice people. But towards the end of their meal, they said that they had started to go to a restaurant that they usually go to where they live, but they had decided when they went in that it was too dark.

Fikel – 1 – 11 And so they came up here and they wanted to know how we kept our restaurant, you know, as nice and light as it was, and it took me a minute to figure out what they were talking about. I didn’t comprehend it at first.

And when I did, I was just like—I was shocked because I thought, I get to be shocked by this; this is something I don’t have to confront very often. But I know that other people have to confront things like that on a much more regular basis. So I feel like it’s my job as someone who doesn’t regularly have to deal with those sorts of things to take any opportunity I have to confront that sort of attitude, and to do what I can to try and educate and combat that sort of attitude.

Q1: Did you confront them?

Fikel: [11:43:58:00] I did not, because I felt like as an employee of that restaurant, I wasn’t sure how that would be received. I did tell the manager who was there that night, who was there, about it, and they had left at that point. But she said that, you know, in the future, that I was free to tell them that that was not appropriate, and I was happy to hear that I would have been supported in that situation in the future.

Q1: You talked a lot about being white. What makes you white?

Fikel: [11:44:39:00] What makes me white? Well, I mean, I’m white because of the color of my skin. I’m white because of the community I grew up in, because of the culture that I come from. I

Fikel – 1 – 12 mean, I—that’s just how I am; that’s how I grew up. When there’s discussion, I see sometimes online around Thanksgiving and what not, you know, discussions about the difference in white culture versus some other cultures, black culture in particular, about the kinds of foods that we have for Thanksgiving. And you know, I saw a meme just this year that talked about, you know, white people’s Thanksgiving, and it was all the traditional turkey and stuffing. And I’m like, oh wow, that’s our Thanksgiving table. And they were like, “And ours has shrimp, and it has this,” and all of these other things that, yes. I definitely have white culture. [laughs]

Q1: Can you talk to me a little about white culture? What is white culture?

Fikel: [11:45:41:00] White culture—I think that’s a difficult question except for—I think that certain things, you know, like Thanksgiving food, you know, I think that the very traditional Norman Rockwell kind of picture. But other than that, I don’t really know what white culture is.

I don’t know what it looks like, specifically, as opposed to other things, because I think here in the United States we have such a mix of white people who come from other parts of the country, and have—or other parts of the world, sorry, who kind of mix in what their ancestors might have had. So I’m not sure other than that what white culture.

Q1: Because it’s funny, when we talk about black culture, Latino culture, Asian culture, you know, Guatemalan culture—and yet white has been sort of the dominant culture in America. And yet it’s very, very hard for people to name what it actually means.

Fikel: [11:46:50:00] It’s very amorphous.

Fikel – 1 – 13

Q1: Yes, it’s like what it’s not. Like, you know, well, it’s not this, and it’s not that. And I think it kind of parallels how we sort of think of our own race as being something—being white as not being something else. And have you gotten any benefits for being white?

Fikel: [11:47:15:00] Have I got—I’ve gotten a lot of benefits from being white; I’m certain of it.

I know that when I go to stores in certain areas, I don’t get looked at differently. I have been places with friends who were not white, and I can see those friends treated somewhat differently than I am. I know that when I drive down the street in my town, I’m less likely to get pulled over. I’m less likely to get in trouble if I do do something wrong. I feel like I have the ability to put myself out in certain situations and not be as worried about being injured or confronted or things like that, because you know, I’m a forty-year-old white mom. [laughs] So, I’m the innocuous person; I’m the person who can get away with doing things.

Just recently, there was a protest march here in Richmond that went from the Maggie Walker statue that’s just a few blocks away from here, down to the [Robert E.] Lee statue on Monument Avenue because there were a group of Confederates who were coming to, you know, say that they wanted the Lee statue to stay, and so there was a counter-protest that was, I don’t know, at least a hundred times larger than the initial Confederate protest. But so, to that protest march, I wore my Black Lives Matter shirt. And my mom said, “You know, are you sure you want to wear that, you know, it could cause trouble; someone might get upset by it; you could be inviting trouble.” And I said, “Well, that’s what I should do, because I don’t have to worry about the color of my skin getting me into trouble on a daily basis. So I shouldn’t worry that wearing a

Fikel – 1 – 14 shirt on one day is going to get me into trouble, because that’s what I’m fighting for, is for those other people to not have to worry about the color of their skin being something that puts them in danger on a regular basis.”

Q1: Are Jews white?

Fikel: [11:49:32:00] I think some Jews are white, some Jews are not. Some Jews are perceived white; some Jews are perceived not to be white. I mean, the Jewish culture spans a great deal of races. I think that there are Jews who other people might not consider to be white who consider themselves to be white, and vice versa.

Q1: No, I mean, it’s a funny question, because when I talk to a lot of Jewish people, I get really divergent answers, because a lot of Jews do not consider themselves white because of the antiSemitism in this country and other places. And when you look at, like, Charlottesville, they’re not saying blacks will not replace us, they’re saying Jews will not replace us. So, there’s a lot of people in the white nationalist group that don’t really consider Jews white. So, are there any drawbacks to being white?

Fikel: [11:50:45:00] [pause] Honestly, I can’t think of any drawbacks to being white. I can’t think of a situation that I have been in or could be in where being white would be to my detriment.

Fikel – 1 – 15 Q1: Have you ever consciously used your race to get something you want, or change a situation, or navigate a situation in a way that you wanted to, to—

Fikel: [11:51:27:00] I can’t think of anything where I have thought of it in those terms. But certainly there were times like when I was working at the restaurant in South Hill, where I maybe, you know used y’all and things like that, you know, in a way to make myself more someone that the customers could relate to, because I’m clearly not a southerner. And so certainly there have been times where I maybe changed how I put myself forward to fit a certain situation, but I can’t specifically think of a time when I thought, you know, okay, my whiteness is really going to help me here. But again, I’m sure that there are plenty of times where it does anyway.

Q1: Are you happy that you’re white?

Fikel: [11:52:30:00] I’m not—I mean, sure. I’m happy with who I am. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it in terms of, I’m happy that I have white skin. I have thought of my children and some of the climate of our country. I have thought that I’m happy that my children are white, especially my large fifteen-year-old son. I have absolutely thought that it’s a good thing that he’s white, because I would feel like he was in a lot more peril if he weren’t white.

Q1: And have you—you talk about this idea of like, using your whiteness to confront people.

Are there any examples in your community where you’ve done that?

Fikel – 1 – 16 Fikel: [11:53:24:00] [pause] Where I worked in South Hill, most of the people that work there are very conservative. And I absolutely was not quiet about my views, when people would say things like, “Oh, look, there’s a news piece on Will Smith and his huge house, and they say that black people don’t have everything that white people do, but look at Will Smith.” And so I would absolutely say, you know, as someone I knew that they would maybe take more seriously on it, I would say, you know, “Look, just because Will Smith has a big house, that doesn’t mean that black people aren’t still disenfranchised in this country, that you need to consider more than just what this one person has accomplished; you need to look at the community as a whole and how they’re treated. And think about the fact that Prince Edward County, which is not very far from here, voluntarily disbanded their school district until the 1980s just so they didn’t have to allow black people in.” And I’ve said, you know, “Look, this is in my lifetime, so don’t tell me that white people don’t still have an advantage, because we clearly do.” So absolutely, I have used my position as someone who – I feel like I can speak at least with some semblance of education and erudition. So, I absolutely will use that in situations where I feel like maybe someone might listen to me where they might not listen to someone who’s black, or someone who isn’t white.

Q1: And you know, what do you credit with—we talked to a lot of people and some people are very open to this idea and exploring the idea; some people are really resistant to even acknowledging the idea that white privilege exists. And what do you credit with your openness and interest in exploring this part of yourself?

Fikel – 1 – 17 Fikel: [11:55:29:00] I’m not sure where if there—I’m not sure if there’s been a specific instance that made me go, oh, hey—you know, why do I have white privilege, or how does that come about that idea of thinking about white privilege and how it affects my life and my kids’ lives. I think it’s just a matter of, I do come from a fairly liberal family, and I also think that maybe moving around the country and living in different places in different communities has helped me to see people in different ways that I might not have if I lived in the same town my entire life surrounded by the exact same people. Although I’ve always been surrounded by white community, I feel like that exposure to different people and different other communities and things like that has helped.

Being a Reform Jew, the community that I was in in California had a very active social justice committee, and the situation in Darfur [Sudan] was at the forefront of a lot of the work that they did. And I think just keeping myself open to ideas and possibilities, and actively seeking out people—and I have to say that Facebook has been very helpful in that because there are communities and groups that I have been connected with that I wouldn’t have otherwise; groups and people that have brought things to my attention, and brought ideas to the forefront that I would not have thought about otherwise, would not have confronted otherwise.

After this last presidential election, I think it was two days later, there was a group here in Richmond, a SURJ group, Showing Up for Racial Justice, that met at the local Unitarian Universalist Church, and that was a really empowering thing. And that is a group specifically for white people to figure out what they can do to promote social justice and racial justice. And

Fikel – 1 – 18 certainly they don’t exclude people of any race, but it’s meant for white people to confront their white privilege and to figure out what they can do to promote racial justice in general.

Q1: Now, it sounds like you’re really focused on this, and what about your—in your activism, in talking to people, what about in your personal life? How diverse is your own friend group and the people that – houses you go to, come to your farm, things like that?

Fikel: [11:58:28:00] As far as diversity and personal life, it is primarily white. We homeschool, and the homeschool community across the country is primarily white. But it’s not one hundredpercent white. I try to reach out to anyone in the community. I have to say that in our town of Blackstone, my husband and I have made it a point to try and connect with people who are not white. There’s one restaurant in the town that is owned by a black couple, and we try to make sure that we patronize that restaurant. When Dave Bratt came to do a town hall meeting in Blackstone as far away from the center of his population as he could manage, he was going to show up that day I think at six p.m. or something like that. And I made it a point to go on Facebook to the different groups, the liberal groups that I knew were going to be coming to attend that town hall meeting, I made a point to let them know, hey there is this one restaurant in town that’s owned by people of color, and you know, that would be really great if people could go and spend some money at that restaurant.

We make it a point to try and talk to people in the community who aren’t white. And every year there’s an arts and crafts festival that’s hosted in our town, and we have two big livestock guardian dogs that we bring, and all the kids brush them the whole weekend, and get to play with

Fikel – 1 – 19 them, and lay on them, and they love it. And we try to make it a point to, you know, talk to everyone, but to really let people know that we—in a subtle way, I mean, I don’t know how you do that, but you know, just to make it a point to make it clear that we welcome anyone to our farm, and talk to everyone, talk to all the kids no matter what.

Q1: Why do you think it’s so hard for people who are interested in social justice, interested in racial justice, and I’m not—my life is the same way is that still our friend groups tend to be so segregated?

Fikel: [nodding]

Q1: Even though we probably go work together, have diverse people that we like to do activism with and all that stuff, but still, like when people sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, or people going for a party, or dinner, they tend to be all white.

Fikel: [12:01:08:00] I think sometimes it can be difficult to break out of your community. Some of it may depend on where you work, and where you live, and things like that. I know that, myself, I worry that someone might think that I’m tokenizing them. I don’t want someone to feel like, hey, I’m extending a hand of friendship just because of the color of your skin. But I do know that for me personally, because a lot of our community is within homeschooling, and is also because my son plays bagpipes, is within the Scots Irish community, I feel like there’s maybe not as much opportunity in those particular communities for us to have more diversity, just because of the nature of those communities.

Fikel – 1 – 20

Q1: Can you talk to me a little bit about the hierarchy of your identity, like, you know, you’re Jewish; you’re a farmer; you’re a wife; you’re a woman—like what are the things that you sort of think are important about you and impact your life?

Fikel: [12:02:17:00] If I were to try and rank myself as far as what’s the most important, what I think about the most, I would say I probably think about being a mother the most. Next, probably being a woman, and after that, things probably get a little bit more muddled. My race, myself, is not as high up. My occupation as a farmer is probably less important than the whole homeschooling mom part, although farmer is my occupation, I spend a lot more time doing the homeschooling part of it. So yes, I would say race maybe comes in fifth or sixth.

Q1: Well it’s funny, because you’ve talked a lot about race, maybe it’s just the context of this conversation, but that it isn’t something that’s sort of primary, and that it sounds like you feel that being a woman has impacted your life a lot more than being white.

Fikel: [12:03:20:00] I do feel like being a woman has impacted me more than being white, as far as things that it has made more difficult for me. So I think I don’t think about my own race as much because it doesn’t have a negative impact on me. But I know that being a woman has. I know that, you know, when I have to go get a car fixed, or when I have to do anything where other people might think of it as more of a man’s thing, that being a woman makes things more difficult.

Fikel – 1 – 21 When we had our farm in California, we were surrounded by what’s left of the dairy farms in southern California, owned mainly by Dutch families, and they still very much have, you know, the man is the head of the household kind of idea. And there was a man who used to come over to talk about farming things, and animals, and stuff like that; he was interested in how we were farming. And the first two times he came over, he didn’t want to talk to me; he wanted to talk to my husband. So he would ask if my husband was home, and I would say, “No, can I help you?”

And he would say, “Oh, I’ll wait until your husband’s home.”

So the third time when he came over and my husband was home, and I told my husband about this, that you know, this guy keeps on coming over but he won’t talk to me about farming; he says he wants to talk about farming stuff and he won’t talk to me. So the third time he came over, my husband was home. He, you know, went up to my husband and he said, you know, “Oh hey, I wanted to talk to you about this and that, and I had some questions.” And my husband looked at him, he goes, “Oh, well, she’s the boss, talk to her.” [laughter]

So, you know, I can think of a lot more times in my life where my gender has had more of an impact negatively than my race has. So while I think about race a lot in terms of where our country is at, and where the status of racial justice is in the country, and what can I do to help with that, I don’t always—or even usually think of it in terms of my race personally.

Q1: And what is the—now that you’ve at least started thinking about this, what is the narrative that you can offer white people who are tenuous, or they’re nervous about joining this discussion? Are you offering, well, you have to accept guilt and privilege? What is the narrative

Fikel – 1 – 22 of your life that makes you—or how you see yourself, and how would you tell someone to engage this work? Like, what’s in it for them?

Fikel: [12:06:00:00] I think the narrative that I would encourage others to consider is to just stop and think about what you think other people’s lives are like. Do you—I’m not expecting anyone to have white guilt. I do expect people to at least consider white privilege, whether or not they come from a poor family or not. I would like for people to stop and think about the reality of how people of color move through our society. I would like for them to consider statistics on people of color in prison, and sentencing for people of color. I would like for people to stop and think for a second, and to take their own race and just say, I’m not going to think about myself and my whiteness, and you know, how I move through life; I would like for people to stop and think about how others move through life, but to do it honestly.

I think that a lot of white people, especially the white southerners that I have met, you know, they say, I came from a dirt-poor family, you know, we all lived at Grandpa’s farm, and you know, we didn’t get anything; we had to work for everything that we have. And my response was, well, where did Grandpa’s farm come from? You know, do you think that black people in this area had the same opportunity to have Grandpa’s farm to fall back on, to go to? Do you consider that when slavery was abolished, do you consider what people’s lives were like; what black people’s lives were like at that point? Do you really think that they had all the same opportunities as your family; whether you were dirt-poor or not, was your life as a dirt-poor white person the same as a life of a dirt-poor black person, and to honestly think about that.

Fikel – 1 – 23 Q1: And if they say, well that was a long time ago. This is 2017. I didn’t oppress anybody; I’m living in this—I struggled in my life. There’s lots of opportunities for black people. There’s lots of affirmative action programs. There’s lots of things. That’s not—that doesn’t fly with me.

Fikel: [12:08:24:00] I think I would say to people who are still, you know, stuck on this idea that that was a long time ago, that that doesn’t happen anymore, I think I would ask them to honestly listen to people of color, to stop and to listen to the experiences that they have, whether it is going into a store, or a restaurant, or something like that, and being treated differently, or whether it’s the person who sends out resumes with one name on it and gets no responses, and then they change their name on a resume to something that sounds more white, and to see what their responses are now. I think that I would challenge them to honestly listen to the stories of people of color, and to take that into account when they say, oh, things happened a long time ago, and also to think about, what is your response to people of color?

Do you honestly hear a story about, you know, a black person who commits a crime, and a white person who commits a crime, and does your head really take you to the same place as far as, that person’s guilt, what sentence that person deserves, and things like that. And I think that if we’re honest with ourselves, simply by nature of the society that we live in, we are programmed to think of people of color as guilty more often than innocent, whereas we’re programmed to think of white people as innocent more often than guilty. And I know that it’s a hard concept for people, and there are people who simply don’t want to accept it, but I think that if people really are able to look at things in an open and honest manner, and to really consider what their life has

Fikel – 1 – 24 been like, and to think about what their life would be like if they were a different race, I think that they would start to see things a little bit more for how they are.

Q1: Would you voluntarily give up being white?

Fikel: [12:10:33:00] Would I voluntarily give up being white? Yes? I mean, I—it’s something where—[pause]—I would have to know, I guess, what are the stakes, you know what I mean?

Q1: Well, you know the stakes; you’ve just been talking about the stakes.

Fikel: [12:10:05:00] [laughs] But I mean, I would want to know—why? Why would I need to give up being white? Would it be something that would benefit me? No. You know, so would it be something that I would do just on a whim if I could? No, I wouldn’t. Because I do know that it would make life harder, that I would be treated differently. But would I do it if it were going to have some sort of a benefit overall, whether it’s bringing awareness to people; whether it’s, you know, something where, yes. I mean, I guess if there were some benefit that it would bring, then yes, I would. But as it stands, if it were just something where, okay, I wake up tomorrow and I’m not white; I’m some other race, no, because it would make my life more difficult.

Q1: Is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you think is important to say in the context of a conversation like this?

Fikel: [12:12:07:00] [pause] I can’t think of anything in particular.

Fikel – 1 – 25

Q1: Okay, well, this is great, speaking to you. I really appreciate it. We’re just going to take some stills of you now, so if you just sit and relax, and look at the camera. [pause] And smile.

Relax your face again. [pause] Okay. Thank you so much, really appreciate you coming out.

[END OF INTERVIEW]